Dot 2: Rob Crooke, Intel’s SVP for its Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group, blogged on March 19: “We’re also excited about soon-to-be released Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory that will be available on next-generation Intel Xeon processors for data centres. This is redefining the memory and storage hierarchy and bringing persistent, large-scale memory closer to the processor.”

Dot 3: Late last year Intel announced the availability of Optane DIMMs in a beta testing program for OEMs and cloud service providers, which “paves the way for general availability in the first half of 2019.”

The Cascade Lake AP upgrade of Intel’s data centre Xeon server CPU line was announced in November last year and these CPUs support Optane DIMMs. Cascade Lake AP parts are single or dual-socket processors with up to 48 cores and 12 DDR4 channels per package.

The Optane DIMMs come in 128GB, 256GB and 512GB capacities. A 2-socket Cascade Lake AP could have 12 X DDR4 memory channels, each supporting 2 DIMMs, either DRAM or Optane DIMMs. There could be a maximum of 6TB of Optane memory.

The first Cascade Lake AP iteration is a multi-chip package combining two 24-core processors connected by a UPI link, into a single 48-core CPU.

That would be 12 x 512GB Optane DIMMs, leaving 12 DIMM sockets for DRAM – the servers use a mix of DRAM and Optane.

Things have moved on

These servers would support up to 12TB of Optane DIMM capacity and be available from July onwards.

Waxman is pointing to a second iteration of Cascade Lake AP with 28-cores/socket – 4 more cores than before, and 12 DIMMs per CPU (socket). This adds up to 6 memory channels per CPU, as before, and 24 memory channels in total.

Our conclusion is that Intel will announce 4-socket, 112-core Cascade Lake AP packages on April 2 that support up to 12TB of Optane memory. Server systems using this will be coming available from Dell EMC, HPE, Lenovo, Inspur, Supermicro and Quanta, with first shipments in July.